Any man who has been in a relationship for a while has heard that one before. And experienced things you didn’t know could come from your gorgeous little petunia.

But the doctor was correct. There really wasn’t any smell. I couldn’t let it go that easy, however.

“That one sounded kind of wet,” I said with a laugh.

If she could have reached me from the gurney, she would have hit me. She was truly embarrassed and the nurse chastised me in her defense.

Realizing that conversations behind the patient curtains to our left and right had fallen silent, I wanted my wife to let go a barrage of cheese-cutters.

In such matters, I easily have our family’s in-house record for length, volume and tonality (from cushion-crushing bass thumpers to dog-whistle high steam shots). I can make no claim that mine don’t smell, however. And I also have few rivals in that department.

So I offered to lay down a line of fire in order to divert the attention to me. But my laughter about all of it bordered on non-support in my wife's time of need. And she was about done.

This was the easy part of the colonoscopy she had this past week, a procedure she has been after me to have for the past few years.

Doctors say they could save the lives of many more people — men in particular — if they didn't put off having colonoscopies. It is advised for men around age 50.

“I think it’s fear — fear of the unknown,” Tammy Schrock, practice administrator for Gastroenterology of Southwest Michigan, told me last March during a big push by the Kalamazoo medical community to screen more people for colon cancer. Somehow I was busy and missed the push.

“They hear the stories about the (procedure) prep and they are not
sure about having a procedure done in that part of their body,” said
Schrock, who is also chairperson or the Kalamazoo Colorectal Cancer
Awareness Network.

Having someone run a 6-foot tube into my 5-foot colon seems like an
indelicate procedure that is worth avoiding. At the very least, I think I would need the doctor to turn down the
lights, pour me a couple of glasses of wine and put on some soft music.

But my wife said preparing for the procedure was the difficult part — no food since the afternoon before and repeated trips to the bathroom after taking the bowel-cleaning medicines they provide to flush you out.

She said the hot air wasn’t too much fun. But my wife, who dispenses Motrin, Tylenol, Aleve and aspirin faster than our kids can describe their pains, said the whole thing was no problem.

“It wasn’t that bad. It was fun watching everything and seeing everything the doctor sees,” she said.

Because she was awake, the gastroenterologist, Dr. Kevin Beyer, let her watch on a monitor he was using.

Beyer explained that doctors have to shoot warm air into the colon to make it expand. He or she needs to check for potentially cancerous polyps. Doctors use devices that allow them to see any abnormal growths and cut them out immediately. My wife had none.

Now that she has been through it — with no pain-killers — it looks like my turn.

I'll have to make sure the boys are in the post-procedure area. And that one of them records the noise. It may be a new family record for volume and tonality.